When Words Sell: The Differential Impact of Emotional Language on Consumer Willingness and Satisfaction

作者：Kailu Yang, Sirui Zeng, Han Zhang · 发表于：Advances in Economics Management and Political Sciences · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.54254/2754-1169/2025.bl28937 · 研究领域：Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification、Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior、Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

This study investigates the impact of emotional language in advertisements on consumers' decision making. Our findings reveal that emotional descriptions have different influence on necessities, symbolic products, and luxury goods. At the same time other factors, including education, age, income level, living areas, gender, and what tier cities are tested as variables, and the results show that with different control of these variables have different impacts on the results. However, the limitation on the number of participants may influence the generalizability of our conclusions. Meanwhile, we find that emotional description does not increase consumers’ willingness and satisfaction to buy necessities, like water (cheap and only has utilitarian value) and luxury, like diamond rings (expensive and has nearly all symbolic value). However, it increases willingness (+20.9) and satisfaction (+12.6%) to buy symbolic goods, like sneakers (medium-priced, possess some utilitarian and some symbolic value) and consumers are even willing to pay higher prices than usual. However, there is limited evidence showing the persistence of the impact of these emotional languages on consumer behaviors. This will be part of our future research.